PRINCIPIO DE BERNOULLI

John Lehmann was twenty-three years old when he was hired by the Woolfs as manager of the Hogarth Press in January 1931. He was a friend of Virginia’s nephew Julian Bell, who had suggested Lehmann send a collection of his poems to the Woolfs. He did, and they not only offered to publish him, but to give to him a job. Lehmann only ended up staying until September

27 _{Woolf did not write a lot about Night and Day while she was at work on it, so its origins and development are}

somewhat murkier than for many of her later books. It was published in 1919. “The Mark on the Wall” was first published in 1917, then in a slightly revised form again in 1919; “An Unwritten Novel” was published in 1920. Woolf links the two sketches to the development of her next novel after Night and Day in her diary entry of 26 January 1920, where she says she has “arrived at some idea of a new form for a new novel” (D2 13).

1932, when wanderlust and frustration with Leonard led him to flee to Europe, but he returned in 1938 as a partner, buying out Virginia’s share, and stayed till the beginning of 1946. Within a year of his hiring, Lehmann began to influence the Press by bringing in younger writers such as his friend Christopher Isherwood. Lehmann was instrumental in the publication of the anthology

New Signatures in February 1932, the first book to collect work by some of the foremost

members of “the Auden Generation” (W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender, C. Day Lewis, Julian Bell,

William Empson, and Lehmann himself).28

Lehmann and Virginia Woolf talked frequently of poetry and new writers. Her 1927 essay “Poetry, Fiction, and the Future” had portrayed poetry as inadequate to the present moment and called for a new type of novel “written in prose, but which has many of the characteristics of poetry” (Essays 4: 435). She and Lehmann discussed these ideas, and he encouraged her to contribute to the new series of Hogarth pamphlets in which various intellectuals and writers penned essays in the form of letters. She said she would do so, and would use his name, and “then I’ll pour forth all I can think of about you young, and we old, and novels — how damned they are — and poetry, how dead. But I must take a look into the subject, and you must reply, ‘To an old novelist’…” (Letters 4: 381).

Woolf’s “Letter to a Young Poet” was published in July 1932 and succeeded in annoying Lehmann and his friends, especially as Woolf quoted what she considered weak passages from their work and declared no-one should publish anything before they were thirty years old. Her central complaint was that poetry was inadequate to the reality of the day and that the young poets were too obsessed with themselves, seemingly uninterested in other people. “That is your

28 _{Lehmann wrote about this period of his life in Thrown to the Woolfs, and John Willis chronicles Lehmann}

problem now,” she wrote, “if I may hazard a guess — to find the right relationship, now that you know yourself, between the self that you know and the world outside” (Essays 5: 315). She defended some of her positions in a private letter to Lehmann, saying that the young poet “doesn’t reach the unconscious automated state — hence the spasmodic, jerky, self conscious effect of his realistic language,” and then added, referencing a common charge against her own work: “But I may be transferring to him some of the ill effects of my own struggles the other way round — writes poetry in prose” (Letters 5: 383).

Even in the letter, Woolf seems to recognize that she is not an ideal reader of contemporary poetry, and her recognition that the “Letter to a Young Poet” may be mis-

addressed is astute. It is not especially insightful about the younger generation of writers, but it is highly revealing if read as a “Letter to an Aging Virginia Woolf”.

Woolf began writing the “Letter to a Young Poet” just as The Waves was published and as she was reflecting more and more on the relationship of her writing to the world. For many years, she had thought about the connections between fact and vision — or, as she memorably put it in the 1927 essay “The New Biography”, between granite and rainbow (Essays 4: 478) — and felt that her novels after Night and Day had been rainbow “novels of vision” rather than granite “novels of fact”. After The Waves, fact called to her again. In November 1931, when she was in the midst of writing the “Letter to a Young Poet”, she said that one day while in London she “was thinking of another book — about shopkeepers & publicans, with low life scenes” (Diary 4: 53). Certainly, as a novelist, Woolf had written about many sorts of people, but there was still a lingering sense for her that by surrendering so much of her work to vision, she had skated perilously close to the brittle ice covering an abyss of personal, even hermetic, language. Now, with the world economy crumbling, with governments falling and civilization itself

seemingly in peril, it made no sense to her to continue along the lines she had followed for a decade.

The Years began as The Pargiters, the work that Woolf in November 1932 dubbed an “essay-novel” (Diary 4: 129). The Pargiters, though, began from a speech that in January 1931 Woolf conceived of as becoming a book that could be “a sequel to A Room of Ones Own — about the sexual life of women: to be called Professions for Women perhaps” (Diary 4: 6). The hybridity of the essay-novel was not a new concept for Woolf, for she had similarly first

conceived of The Waves as a “play-poem” (Diary 3: 139), and few of her books after Night and Day lack generic mixing.

After Woolf’s death, scholars’ descriptions of The Pargiters manuscript suggested that Woolf kept the boundaries of the essay and novel forms clear: essay sections alternated with novel sections (and the revised novel sections became The Years while the revised essay sections became Three Guineas). This assumption affected the editing of the manuscript for publication. Editor Mitchell Leaska added genre-descriptive section headings (First Essay, First Chapter, Second Essay, Second Chapter…) where Woolf usually only placed a doodle.29 _{Grace Radin, in}

an influential study of the writing and revising of The Years, described the structure of The Pargiters thus: “After each scene of the novel, Woolf inserts an interpretive essay in which she analyzes the events she has just portrayed and relates them to their historical background, using facts and quotations gleaned from biographies and other documents” (14-15). This description is both accurate and too simple, because what is clear when reading The Pargiters is just how much trouble Woolf had keeping the genres separate. While Woolf certainly thought of the sections as

29 _{For instance, what Leaska titles “First Chapter” was titled by Woolf “Chapter Fifty-Six” to show that what she}

distinct from each other, Anna Snaith notes what is obvious from an unbiased reading of the text: that the “[e]ssay sections in The Pargiters often lapse into fictional dialogue and vice versa” (“Introduction” lxiii). Molly Hite has recently examined the genre status of The Pargiters at some length, concluding that it “is less a ‘hybrid’ of two genres than a new sort of experimental novel, which responds with thematic and formal innovation to the political and historical contingencies of the more and more ominous developments of the 1930s” (168).

Critics have traditionally seen The Years as the novel rescued from the essay and Three Guineas as the essay rescued from the novel, but James Haule, Alice Wood, and Anna Snaith have shown that when the manuscripts, galleys, and proofs of The Years are examined in order, without thinking of Three Guineas as a foregone conclusion, the story of Woolf’s process is much more complex. Pamela Transue described Woolf’s original goal to use “fictional sketches to illustrate points made in the essays” so she could show “how the woman novelist observes certain facts around her, forms opinions, and then transforms those opinions into the entirely different domain of art” (147). But the novel passages were not “sketches”; instead, Woolf positioned them as excerpts from an imagined book or series of books. A careful reading of The Pargiters shows that these novel extracts were intended as exemplary parts from which the reader could extrapolate the whole and from which the narrator of the essay sections could expound ideas. Randi Solomon describes the effect, and the problems it posed for Woolf, thus:

Readers are necessarily implicated in the narrator’s self-conscious pretence that the gaps that are evident in her selections from the novel under consideration will be immediately erased when one turns to the actual work. They are thereby forced into complicity with the narrator’s representation of the novel as a utilitarian genre. That is, if you believe that

the full meaning of a novel can be garnered from detailed examinations of brief extracts, without so much as a skimming over of the main body of the text, you cannot possibly be invested in the aesthetic value of the given work taken as a whole, especially considering that, in this case, the work is fictional not only in the sense that it is “made up”, but also in that it does not exist at all outside the imagination of the speaker and her audience. (144)

What such a structure creates is not an “essay-novel”, but rather an essay. Hite writes that “the sections of commentary are no more detachable from the whole work than the ‘chapters’ are” (171), but this is only true in the sense that the essayistic passages refer back to the novel passages for evidence. The ideas within the essayistic passages are tranferable and could be attached to other evidence. While the novel pieces could not exist, except as fragments, outside of the essay structure, the essays’ ideas could certainly have been conveyed without the novel itself — as, indeed, many of those ideas were in various essays and Three Guineas.

Whatever her reasons for abandoning the essay-novel concept, the strategy Woolf chose in her revisions is quite clear: she assiduously removed narrative commentary and heightened the ambiguity in characters’ motivations. As Evelyn T. Chan demonstrates particularly well, Woolf’s move away from her original structure was motivated by a fear of didacticism: Chan notes that “a week before deciding to remove the novel-essay division,” Woolf wrote in her diary, “I’m afraid of the didactic” (Diary 5: 145), but “Woolf may in the end have been fearful of not just the didactic, but also the wrong didactic in a form of writing that she wanted to convey an

unimpaired truth” (612). Chan’s idea of the wrong didactic helps show that the shift from The Pargiters to The Years was a shift in the effect Woolf sought to have on readers. Where her

initial impulse had been to put readers into a position of needing to extrapolate missing chapters of a novel from information in essays and commentary that explain (at length) the meaning of social structures, psychologies, and behaviors, her final structure does exactly the opposite, providing a complete novel (if one filled with gaps) and conspicuously refusing to explain much of anything. What Chan calls “the pregnant emptiness of the published version” (613) is a text that demands a reader imagine much more than any dreaded “preachy” text does. The result of the revisions brings The Years more in line with Woolf’s earlier novels, which Erich Auerbach described as having an effect “that we might call a synthesized cosmic view or at least a challenge to the reader’s will to interpretive synthesis” (549). The strategy of The Years was to activate that will to interpretive synthesis, to put it to work.

The overall effect of the pattern Woolf originally established subordinates the novel passages to the essay passages, with the extracts from the (otherwise unwritten) novel as

illustrations for ideas within the essay (rather than the essay passages as items within the novel), but from the beginning the text unsettles its nonfictional status. As early as what Leaska labels the “Second Essay”, Woolf writes not as if the Pargiters are characters in a novel, but as if they are real people, and the narrative slips out of the expository mode she had established for the essay portions and into the narrative mode of the novel sections, for instance:

The sight of the baby had stirred in each quite a different emotion. Milly had felt a curious, though quite unanalyzed, desire to look at the baby, to hold it, to feel its body, to press her lips to the nape of its neck; whereas Delia had felt, also without being fully conscious of it, a vague uneasiness, as if some emotion were expected of her which, for some reason, some vaguely discreditable reason, she did not feel; and then, instead of

following the perambulator, as her sister did, with her eyes, she turned and came back abruptly into the room, to exclaim a moment later, “O my God,” as the thought struck her that she would never be allowed to go to Germany and study music. (Pargiters 36)

Woolf later revised that passage for the first chapter of The Years, expanding the moment significantly and replacing most of the description of feelings with more concrete details. Radin writes that the descriptions of feelings are interpretive comments of a sort common to the essay sections of The Pargiters, allowing Woolf “to integrate both explication and expansion of her text into the structure of the novel” (19). What’s particularly notable is that when Woolf revised the material into a novel, she didn’t simply polish it, but instead changed the kind of information the passage provided and withheld. Radin notes that Delia’s cry of “O my God” becomes, in The Years, unattached to any obvious motivation, and the girls’ interest in the perambulator is

unexplained, which to Radin means that the girls “seem to share a longing to marry” (19), but other readers could imagine different motivations. The key point is that readers can — must, if meaning is to be made — come up with their own interpretations of the characters’ behavior and thoughts.

Woolf enjoyed The Pargiters’ form at first, mostly because it was a change from the type of work she had done on The Waves. She plunged into significant research (originally for her 1931 speech for the London and National Society for Women’s Service, eventually leading to

Three Guineas), and continued with that research for many months. Though the writing and revision process continued on laboriously into 1937, with the manuscript changing its shape and focus many times, as early as April 1933 Woolf had imagined what The Years would ultimately turn out to be: a melding of her early “novel of fact” (Night and Day) with her recent “novel of

vision” (The Waves). “I want to give the whole of the present society—nothing less: facts, as well as the vision,” she wrote in her diary. “And to combine them both. I mean, The Waves going on simultaneously with Night & Day. Is this possible?” (Diary 4: 151-152).

In the middle of February 1932, Woolf began the process of removing the explicitly essayistic sections from The Pargiters, setting the manuscript on the long course toward becoming The Years. Why she decided her original plan would not work has been a subject of speculation for everyone who has written on The Pargiters, but it remains speculation, for though she chronicled the writing of The Years quite fully in her diary, she did not record her reasons for that particular decision.30 _{Whatever the reasons, once she had decided on a new}

structure, one of her tasks when revising became to remove all traces of a didactic narrator and to cut down on the characters’ own statements of social and political opinion, increasing what more and more became one of the novel’s dominant themes: the failure of words to communicate thoughts accurately and efficiently. After The Years was published, Woolf herself wondered if she had gone too far in cutting, for instance, what have come to be known as the “two enormous chunks”: a section of the 1914 chapter and a complete episode based in 1921, both of which develop Eleanor’s thoughts more fully.31

30 _{Following Leaska, Radin, and Christine Froula, Hite speculates that “Woolf reached back to some of her most}

painful memories from childhood and early adulthood, and the persistence of the threats contained in these memories eventually prompted her to drop the sections of direct commentary in favor of a narrative riddled with gaps, which became The Years” (169). This is plausible, but the question of why Woolf abandoned the form of The Pargiters is unanswerable with current evidence. I am less neutral on Hite’s later conclusion — indeed, the

conclusion to her whole book — that Woolf’s abandonment of The Pargiters was a failure of nerve, a fear of public criticism or ridicule. In the absence of evidence for why Woolf changed her approach, this speculation seems to me to say more about the idea of Woolf that Hite has imagined in her own mind than it does about the woman who went on to write Three Guineas. A question that deserves more analysis (or self-analysis) is why critics such as Radin and Hite feel the need to imagine such a Woolf, and what it is within The Years that so upsets them.

31 _{See Radin Chapter V (80-89) for some discussion of the effect of these deletions on the novel. The cut passages}

are included as appendices in most editions of The Years now, including the Cambridge edition, the Oxford World’s Classics paperback, and the annotated Harcourt paperback.

Though Woolf quite deliberately scraped any whiff of didacticism from the pages of The Years, her long work assembling the novelled to some of the concepts and conclusions in Three Guineas, for The Years required her not only to reflect on her own life and situation, but to research the lives and situations of many other people, particularly women, and to develop